linkflood

[jazzfish]

Although, oddly, no links about the flood. Mostly because I didn't experience it firsthand.

Career advice for cats and foxes: "If you’re struggling to pick just one big thing to do with your life, because too many things are pulling you in too many directions — think instead about what you’re going to do with your first life, knowing that you’ll have a second and a third and even a fifth if you want them." (Are we all aware that Karawynn is smart? Because Karawynn is smart, and you should be reading Pocketmint even if you think you have no interest in personal finance. Dreamwidth feed at pocketmint_feed.)

Glass Works: a brief yet fascinating history of Corning's experiments in glass. I love that Corningware was an accident, and that they've had Gorilla Glass on ice since 1971, "a solution that would have to wait for the right problem to arise."

Comedian Chris Gethard on depression and suicide. Long but worthwhile.

Best headline all month: Ancient statue discovered by Nazis is made from meteorite.

Unmasking Reddit's Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web: "Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit's role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women." Also a followup, and another.

Outlawed by Amazon DRM: "Amazon just closed her account and wiped her Kindle. Without notice. Without explanation." Per this followup she got her books back, but still. Those of us who remember the 1984 debacle in 2009 doubtless saw this coming; for anyone else, this is among the most succinct arguments against The Cloud that I've seen.

Third Draft Struggles: "The same characters, with the same in-world genders, taking the same in-world actions, read totally differently in terms of reader sympathy. ... Switch the pronouns on 'proud, rebellious teenage male' and you get 'mentally ill teenage girl'; switch the pronouns on 'manic pixie dreamgirl' and you get 'asshole'."

---

For pre-Halloween gaming I recapitulated «Le fils de l'homme», because hey, this is a whole new set of people who've not seen that particular apple. I also acquired a pair of those blue boots which mostly fit. They feel fine around the toes, which is a nice change, but they're too big in the heel. Padding and thick socks seem to be solving this problem.

Since I have these boots I've been getting a little dressed up for no reason lately. I continue to hate ties with a passion generally reserved for "it can't be good, it's genre." On the other hand I am at a loss to explain the lack of French cuffs in standard semiformalwear. Because seriously, guys, you don't have all that many opportunities to spiff up or personalise your wardrobe, and cufflinks are awesome. If I could find more good shirts with French cuffs I would be happy.

Also, my distaste for long sleeves may come at least in part from too many instances of 1) "permanent press" (read: nonbreathing) shirts 2) in overly warm churches. Good-quality shirts in decent weather are actually not so bad, temperature-wise! Who knew.

Comments

[thanate]

Ooh, nice boots.

We've found that french cuffs are the sort of thing that happen piecemeal with intermittent searching of the racks at places like TJMax or Ross or wherever. There's also a store down the road from us-- the name of which I've forgotten, of course-- whose target market is apparently black guys, and they have a better selection of both color and more interesting formal wear styles than the mall shops. Some care in label-reading is necessary for picking your fiber content, though. Not sure if this is useful information in your part of the world, but I suspect there are more of them in the eastern US if you want me to look up the name.

[jazzfish]

Thanks! I figured that if I'd been thinking about them for a couple of months and they fit acceptably well, I ought to just go ahead and get them.

My very brief perusal of places like Sears turned up no French cuffs, so I figured they were an endangered species. Good to know they do exist and can be found with searching.

I've seen those stores, and they do tend to have much more interesting clothing... but a lot of it tends to be polyester as well, which I can't stand.

[rbandrews]

To a long-time Redditor, the whole ViolentAcrez saga looks a bit different.

The people who identified him were doing so for entirely selfish reasons and have successfully recast the whole thing to "a troll gets what's coming to him". They're a group called SRS ("Shit Reddit Says"), that was originally started by SomethingAwful admins annoyed that their (paid) subscriptions were dropping as Reddit became more popular, and have been trying for years to destroy Reddit. Which is pretty ironic since, you know, they're a collection of subreddits.

Anyway. Yeah, nuking creepshots was a good thing, as was nuking jailbait a few months ago, but far from everything that SRS does is good. For example, an SRS user has bragged about posting child porn to another subreddit in order to get it banned. Real classy.

So, you know, a plague on both their houses. As far as I'm concerned, great that creepshots is gone, hopefully the people who got rid of it will be the next ones banned.

[jazzfish]

Fair enough. I knew Chen had a rep for being kind of a douchebag, but I didn't realise he was getting info from other douchebags.

[rbandrews]

Oh yeah. That whole community is really just as bad as the ones they're attacking. It's like the feminist version of 4chan.

[sorcyress]

Goddamn do I hear you on the french cuffs thing. I fucking love cufflinks, and due to all the other bullshit surrounding my size and ability to buy menswear, I only own one shirt that can take them. One! Auuuug!

~Sor

[selki]

I don't understand why French cuffs are a requirement for cufflinks. Can't they be worn with ordinary dress shirts?

Nonetheless, I will point out https://www.etsy.com/search?q=french%20cuff%20men&order=most_relevant&view_type=gallery&ship_to=US&ref=auto1

[jazzfish]

My understanding is that French cuffs are defined as "the kind of cuffs you can wear cufflinks with." Normal dress shirts have cuff buttons, which render cufflinks unusable (without a hole on both sides you can't link the cuffs together).

[selki]

Hey, cufflinks that can be used to open handcuffs: http://boingboing.net/2012/11/14/cufflinks-that-open-hand-cuffs.html

[selki]

BTW, I checked with P who says "As for the shirts, I have a nice one from Land's End. There's also Brooks Brothers if you want to spend more money..."

[jazzfish]

Based on my very brief sample, it seems that a great many men's shirts that take cufflinks are tuxedo shirts with ruffles and all. Which is a bit more formalish than I'm looking for, even assuming they fit.

[selki.livejournal.com]

The Corning Glass Museum is pretty nifty. I loved their little sub-museum of ancient glass.

Third Draft Struggles was interesting.